“Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.” — Sholom Aleichem

“I like L.A. because of the light. The light makes me feel so good. It’s really beautiful. And there’s something about L.A. being so spread out that gives you a feeling of freedom. Light and freedom.” — David Lynch

The plots are simple for both.

In Blade Runner, a group of synthetic humans hijack a spaceship and make their way to 2019 Los Angeles, which is forbidden, drawing in a blade runner cop to hunt them down and “retire” them.

In The Terminator, two beings from the future arrive in 1980s Los Angeles and contest one another to see if the robot-being will kill the future mother of mankind’s salvation or if the human soldier will rescue her first.

Let’s begin.

Both evildoers in this linked pairing of movies are nonhumans. In the corporate world of Blade Runner, these are “Replicants” who are biologically designed creatures meant to look and act human, but with greater strength and dexterity. They unfortunately burn out in a handful of years. In the scuzzy urban world of Terminator, the nonhuman is a robot (maybe a cyborg if you count its human skin outer covering) that exists to serve its master, the also-nonhuman A.I. Skynet. Both sets of villains are superior to normal humans. Both sets of villains have no conscience or tender feelings. Both sets of villains lose.

The “blade runner” is a cop whose flying air car takes him from place to place, hunting down replicants. Harrison Ford plays the blade runner, while Rutger Hauer is the main replicant baddie. Hauer is a blond, blue-eyed German-superior type deliberately chosen for his Nazi ubermensch connotations. Whereas Ford is an all-American, weary, P.I.-type dude who doesn’t strut but saunters around. He’s only missing a cigarette to smoke and he’d be perfect in the 1940s.

The “resistance soldier” is played by Michael Biehn. He’s a good-looking young stud who impregnates the woman he’s tasked to save. Their act of love in the night ensures that the future son who saves the world will be born. The resistance soldier can “feel pain” (grunted out in a stolen car in an underground parkade) unlike the machines, and yet his determination to succeed is almost machine-like in its obstinacy.

The blade runner and the resistance soldier are both archetypes of Western culture. The blade runner is the Sword of Authority. The resistance soldier is the Dagger of the Thief. They’re both a bit scuzzy (especially Biehn in his stolen gray trenchcoat covering his naked body [you can only go through Time without any artificial accoutrements on you]) but the blade runner is clearly Sanctioned to do the dirty work. Whereas for the Los Angeles the resistance soldier plays in, his Sanctioning comes from an unofficial source whose higher motivation is the Preservation of the Species. His Sanctioning comes from John Connor, legendary hero-leader who assembles a ragtag army of humans to defeat the unblinking red-eye of the machine intelligence. Skynet does not laugh.

There is a parallel between the movies in that they both have a corporate element. In Blade Runner, the TYRELL CORPORATION builds, markets and vouchsafes the various editions (Nexus 6, presently) of the replicants that come out. In Terminator, CYBERDYNE SYSTEMS finds an arm and partially destroyed chip of a Terminator and builds Skynet out of the ashes of a past: [recycled, hermetically sealed].

Tyrell Corp. is a gigantic entity housed in its own monolithic skyscraper spewing out fire to the night sky (beautiful imagery). Cyberdyne is more low-key, a smaller company operating out of an industrial park with (presumably) just one factory. The men who run these corporations are not good men. They may also be idiot savants in the sense that they’re smart, but fools nonetheless. Like Prometheus, they play with fire, only to end up on the chopping block. CEO Tyrell has his head crushed in the living hands of the replicant who challenges him for more life more life Master (my riff on the event). The CEO of Cyberdyne, a nameless figure, is burned to cinders in the nuclear fire to come. He surely will not survive. They create the engines of their own destruction.

There is some debate over whether the blade runner is really a replicant. At one point, another cop places an origami paper sculpture of a unicorn on a piece of furniture, just as the blade runner is dreaming of a unicorn. Coincidence? Or does he know a replicant’s dreams when he sees them?

There is likewise some debate over where the time-sequence starts in Terminator. The resistance soldier is sent back in time by the future hero-leader, and impregnates Sarah Connor, the hero’s mother, but how can John Connor exist to send his soldier back before he himself is created? What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Does the resistance soldier impregnate first, or does Connor trigger the order first? Or is there some external third force outside the Loop?

Both are fine films that scraped up against the limitations of their budgets. One of the best speeches in cinema history occurs at the end of Blade Runner, when the replicant-leader (Hauer) is on top of a rainy skyscraper in deadly L.A., talking about the things he has seen and done and how they’ll be lost like “tears in the rain” and “time to die” … Perfect. And the actor was the one who came up with those lines! Not the writer! Now that’s some serious bullshit.

“It decided our fate in a millisecond.” Terminator has its gem-like dialogue moments too. But ultimately, both films fail the Shakespearean test: Is it consistently deep, or does it rely on sporadic bursts of wisdom to make its point? As modern American films, both have to be judged Failures for their dereliction of duty on the writer’s most solemn task, to add layers of depth (to paint them on, one by one, thick and unwavering) to the grimy mundane circle of existences which all the viewers find themselves locked in. And that’s saying something.